One Kilometre High And Counting

Skyscrapers are back, with a vengeance. Stephen Cauchi reports on the race to construct the worlds tallest building.

EVEN now, only half-finished, it looks staggering. Just last Wednesday, it became the second tallest skyscraper ever built, surpassing Taiwans 509-metre Taipei 101. It will overtake Sears Tower in Chicago, CN Tower in Toronto and television masts in North Dakota and Warsaw to be the tallest structure ever built by mankind.

Burj Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, will usher in a new era of skyscrapers. Although its final height is being kept a secret, its conservatively estimated it will reach 818 metres. Some tip it will be 940.

Burj Dubai will break records for height in a way not seen since the Eiffel Tower, which on completion in 1889 was nearly twice as high as the next tallest structure, the Washington Monument. It will be hundreds of metres taller than the Warsaw Radio Mast, which at 646 metres held the record as the worlds tallest structure until its collapse in 1991.

But Burj Dubai may not hold the record for long. Another Dubai skyscraper, Al Burj, is slated to begin this year with a rumoured height of 1.2 kilometres. More tentatively, two other kilometre-tall towers are planned in the region: the 1001-metre Mubarak

al-Kabeer in Kuwait and a 1022-metre tower in Manama, Bahrain.

These modern-day Towers of Babel — an apt comparison given their Middle East location and multicultural construction crews — are driven by symbolism rather than necessity, according to the managing director of Australian construction company Grocon, Daniel Grollo. "They like to build tall as a sign of the prosperity of the country — they have the money to push the boundaries."

Grocon, which was to have built the now-abandoned 560-metre Grollo Tower in Melbourne, has been a consultant on the Al Burj tower and may yet be involved in its construction.

The 818-metre Burj Dubai is impressive enough. Will the 1.2-kilometre Al Burj become reality? "My experience after having travelled to the Middle East over the last six to seven years has been that when they put their mind to something and say theyre going to do it, they do it," said Mr Grollo, who said Al Burj had yet to receive planning approval. "Dubai is a very can-do city."

Indeed. The citys recent projects include several man-made archipelagos harbouring ultra-luxurious hotels; the biggest shopping mall in the world; the longest fully automated rail system in the world; massive theme parks and a colossal airport. Impressive for a town of only 1.5 million. And now, restoring a title to the region once held for millennia by the Great Pyramid of Giza, the worlds tallest building.

Burj Dubais 160 floors will be filled by hotel rooms, private apartments, and corporate offices, and serviced by 65 km/h lifts, the worlds fastest. Theyll need to be. Lifts, according to skyscraper architect Henry Feiner of Harry Seidler and Associates, are one of the major constraints on skyscrapers. "If you try to put in enough lifts to service 150-200 floors, youll end up with no floor space on every floor. Its all taken up by lift shafts," he says. The solution — although time-consuming for those on the upper floors — is to design the building as one skyscraper stacked on another.

"It becomes a series of 50-storey buildings stacked on top of each other where you have express shuttle lifts taking you to sky lobbies — a platform at the 50-storey level — and then you start all over again."

But, says Feiner, there is no technological reason why skyscrapers could not go to two kilometres or even higher.

Kim Dovey, Professor of Architecture at Melbourne University, said high-rise buildings were economical, but only to a point. "The economies of scale go up dramatically in buildings up to about 10 storeys, and they continue to go up until about 40, and then they turn the other way — they become very inefficient buildings.

"After about 40 it becomes faintly ridiculous." Thats because, Professor Dovey said, more and more of the building was taken up by lift shafts and servicing tunnels needed to transport people, utilities and goods to ever-greater heights.

But practicality is not the point. "Its an attempt by Dubai to put itself on the world stage."

He admits he finds such buildings inspiring "from a distance and inside looking out" but otherwise is not a fan.

"I think theyre kind of stupid. The little kid that really wants to be noticed — trying too hard."

Tag Cloud

External Information

Additional Information

Where Am I?